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Reinforcement learning has seen wide success in finetuning large language models to better align with instructions via human feedback. The so-called algorithm, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) demonstrates impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Tianjun Zhang , Fangchen Liu , Justin Wong , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Large language models~(LLMs) are expected to be helpful, harmless, and honest. In different alignment scenarios, such as safety, confidence, and general preference alignment, binary preference data collection and reward modeling are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shuai Zhao , Yunqiu Xu , Linchao Zhu , Yi Yang

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

Learning rewards from preference feedback has become an important tool in the alignment of agentic models. Preference-based feedback, often implemented as a binary comparison between multiple completions, is an established method to acquire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Yannick Metz , András Geiszl , Raphaël Baur , Mennatallah El-Assady

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a key factor in aligning model behavior with users' goals. However, while humans integrate multiple strategies when making decisions, current RLHF approaches often simplify this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Evelyn Rose , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Andreas Hochlehnert , Hardik Bhatnagar , Vishaal Udandarao , Samuel Albanie , Ameya Prabhu , Matthias Bethge

Open-ended post-training benefits from rewards that make prompt-specific success conditions explicit, rather than relying only on post-hoc scalar scores. In instruction following, writing, and decision-support tasks, response quality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zijun Weng , Xiaohui Hu , Shuangyong Song , Yongxiang Li , Kaidong Yu , Xuanjing Huang

Designing a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm to approximate a human's unobservable reward function requires assuming, implicitly or explicitly, a model of human preferences. A preference model that poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , W. Bradley Knox , Serena Booth , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the mainstream paradigm used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet existing RLHF heavily relies on accurate and informative reward models, which are vulnerable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Wei Shen , Xiaoying Zhang , Yuanshun Yao , Rui Zheng , Hongyi Guo , Yang Liu

Large pretrained models are showing increasingly better performance in reasoning and planning tasks across different modalities, opening the possibility to leverage them for complex sequential decision making problems. In this paper, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Martin Klissarov , Devon Hjelm , Alexander Toshev , Bogdan Mazoure

While finetuning language models from pairwise preferences has proven remarkably effective, the underspecified nature of natural language presents critical challenges. Direct preference feedback is uninterpretable, difficult to provide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Silviu Pitis , Ziang Xiao , Nicolas Le Roux , Alessandro Sordoni

An effective reward model plays a pivotal role in reinforcement learning for post-training enhancement of visual generative models. However, current approaches of reward modeling suffer from implementation complexity due to their reliance…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Runtao Liu , Jiahao Zhan , Yingqing He , Chen Wei , Alan Yuille , Qifeng Chen

Reward design plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, serving as the bridge between feedback signals and model optimization. This survey provides a structured organization of reward modeling and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Miaomiao Ji , Yanqiu Wu , Zhibin Wu , Shoujin Wang , Jian Yang , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Modern large language models (LLMs) are optimized for human-aligned responses using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, existing RLHF approaches assume a universal preference model and fail to account for individual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Idan Shenfeld , Felix Faltings , Pulkit Agrawal , Aldo Pacchiano

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences. While recent research has focused on algorithmic improvements, the importance of prompt-data construction has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Wei Shen , Guanlin Liu , Zheng Wu , Ruofei Zhu , Qingping Yang , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been credited as the key advance that has allowed Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively follow instructions and produce useful assistance. Classically, this involves generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Alex J. Chan , Hao Sun , Samuel Holt , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reinforcement learning (RL) trained language model agents with tool access are increasingly deployed in coding assistants, research tools, and autonomous systems. We introduce the Reward Hacking Benchmark (RHB), a suite of multi-step tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Kunvar Thaman

Pre-trained large-scale language models (LLMs) excel at producing coherent articles, yet their outputs may be untruthful, toxic, or fail to align with user expectations. Current approaches focus on using reinforcement learning with human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Dehong Xu , Liang Qiu , Minseok Kim , Faisal Ladhak , Jaeyoung Do

Reinforcement learning with human feedback for aligning large language models (LLMs) trains a reward model typically using ranking loss with comparison pairs.However, the training procedure suffers from an inherent problem: the uncontrolled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Hang Zhou , Chenglong Wang , Yimin Hu , Tong Xiao , Chunliang Zhang , Jingbo Zhu

Reward-guided search methods have demonstrated strong potential in enhancing tool-using agents by effectively guiding sampling and exploration over complex action spaces. As a core design, those search methods utilize process reward models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Dawei Li , Yuguang Yao , Zhen Tan , Huan Liu , Ruocheng Guo